The Droid is actually a really decent phone, I enjoyed using it and I think the Android OS is also very good and well eventually become much more popular. The phone had some great features like a slide out keyboard, which was a nice change since I’ve been using iPhone touch screen to text and email for about 2 years now. The camera 5.0 MP camera was also very good but besides the fact of it having a Flash in dark settings the quality of pictures was not better then iPhone pictures. The touch screen on the Droid is decent but definitely falls short of the iPhone, there’s just something about the iPhone’s screen that makes everything so accurate and sensitive to touch and easy to use, it also supports multi-touch gestures while the Droid does not yet. My favorite feature on the Droid that the iPhone does not offer was the ability to tether via the 3G when my connected to my computer with a USB cable, this is more the network then the device but it was definitely nice to have internet access where ever I was (with no wi-fi). My only real problem with the phone was the overall size of the device. It was quite heavy ad just didn’t feel as nice as an iPhone does in my hand.

One thing I really missed was my Mobile Me service that synchronized all my iCal and Address Book data from my Macbook to my iPhone instantly and wirelessly. Mobile Me also has some other features that I just recently discovered; If you lose your iPhone you can log into your MM account and use the locate my iPhone tools which consist of a pulse that can be used to locate your phone if it’s hidden under your couch, a GPS location feature that brings up your iPhone exact location using Google Maps and also the ability to complete wipe your phone out and send a custom message to it, if it happens to fall into the wrong hands.

In the end I’m glad I was able to test out the Droid and Verizon for a couple weeks risk free but am definitely glad to have a new iPhone 3GS, which is actually an upgrade from my 3G. I can now take video and I notice the speed in UI transitions is a bit faster.

Within the last couple of months, AT&T’s 3G network has been a nightmare, just terribly slow and I believe cluttered with so many iPhone users, I think more so for me because I live in a rather big city that happens to be located in a valley between lots of mountains. I was really beginning to lose patients with the service when what at first was a tragedy turned out to be somewhat of a blessing. I dropped my iPhone on my mothers tile floor and it shattered the screen pretty bad. After calling AT&T and inquiring how much it would cost me to replace my broken iPhone I decided my best and cheapest out was to get a new phone from another service at a new customer price.

I decided that I’d go with Motorola’s Droid after hearing pretty good feedback on it and the Verizon network which I learned from my own experience is the best service available in the states. I’m glad I didn’t replace the iPhone for full retail (~$500) and went with a new phone/contract, It cost me $200 out the door and i’m locked into a 2 year contract for the same price I was paying at AT&T only now I’m confident I have a service that will work not only in more places but my 3G speeds with be much faster.

I’ve had the Droid for 2 days now and I’m still familiarizing myself with the Android OS, which is surprisingly good. I think the Android phones are really going to become much more popular unless Apple decides to get out of the exclusive contract with AT&T because I feel many iPhone AT&T customers are stuck with AT&T only for the iPhone. If Verizon was to eventually get the iPhone I would likely get it again, but I feel a reliable network and service is more important then the phone itself.

First, I downloaded the iPhone 3.0 restore file (iPhone1,2_3.0_7A238j_Restore.ipsw) via bit torrent and attempted to manually restore my iPhone from iTunes with the 3.0 file which was located on my desktop. Everything was going smoothly, it took a couple of minutes for the update to install on my iPhone then my phone restarts and I see this lovely screen in iTunes.

After doing some research I learned that in order to use the 3.0 beta OS you must be apart of the Apple Developers Program which came along with a price of $99/year for the standard package and $299/year for the enterprise. At this point I figured I’d just wait a couple months for the 3.0 OS to be released to the public and decided to restore my iPhone to latest backup which was that day, before I attempted the 3.0 upgrade. Unfortinuately there was no way to restore my iPhone from iTunes, so after a bit more research, I learned that by a specific key stroke I can reboot my iPhone in something called “Restore Mode” which will give me the option to restore my iPhone from iTunes from a file on my computer.

I was able to successfully restore the 2.2.1 OS on my iPhone but after the completion of the software update my phone would reboot as always and iTunes would give me the error below (1013). Apparently the baseband that comes with OS 3.0 won’t downgrade using any method on either the 2st Gen or iPhone 3G. There is no unlock for the new baseband (or the current one for that matter).

When you DFU restore to 2.2.1 iTunes will give you an error at the end (most likely 1015 or 1013) indicating a baseband/firmware mismatch.

So feeling pretty frustrated at this point, I decided I would just put 3.0 back on my iPhone and purchase the Developers Program from Apple. I filled out the application and at the end was notified that the Application has been submitted and I will be contacted by a representative within 5-7 business days. Meanwhile I have no phone, so I figured the best thing to do at this point would be to bring it in to the Apple Store and have them take a shot at recovering it.

Of course the Apple Store in the Fashion Show mall was busy and had no openings to see me until the following day. I was without my phone for over 24hours and it was pretty bad, but when I finally got it into the Apple Store, they attempted the same restore I did, failing as I did and ended up just replacing the device with a new one.

So all is well again and I guess I’ll just have to wait like everyone else for MMS, Landscape texts, Internet Tethering and copy & paste.

• Create custom ring tones using your own .MP3s
• Synchronize your iPhone with multiple iTunes Librarys (computers)

Creating Custom Ring Tones with iTunes only

Using the instructions in this article I can now take any DRM free music (MP3s) from my computer and convert them into perfect quality ring tones without paying iTunes $1. Not that I’m cheap or anything but it’s nice to be able to create ring tones from any song you’d like and not be limited to the few songs iTunes offers as ring tones.

In short what your doing is clipping the song down to 30 seconds or less, converting the .MP3 into iTune’s AAC format (.m4a) then renaming the file extension .m4r so iTunes recognizes the media as a ring tone. It’s really quite simple, and only takes a couple of minutes.

Synchronizing your iPhone with multiple iTunes Libraries/Computers

In my opinion this should be an option to any iPhone owner. I understand why Apple designed it this way, so you can’t just plug in your iPhone to any library and steal other peoples music, but what if you have 2 computers of your own, both sharing a library on an external HD on your own network? I’m sure there are a ton of other scenarios where people would want to synchronize their iPhones with multiple PCs and not lose the data from their device.

Thanks to this article I can now sync all my Contacts and iCal with my Macbook, while I control which music I want on my iPhone using my desktop PC. Basically I changed the library ID on my PC to match the library ID of my Macbook so iTunes thinks it’s the same library each time I synchronize. Just be careful with these steps, you could very easily mess things up.